[imagesource: Phillip Keith for Bloomberg Businessweek]

These days, we expect any true-crime story worth its salt to be turned into a docuseries.

Most recently, the story of the Golden State Killer has received the treatment, although I would also highly recommend The Pharmacist and The Innocence Files.

I don’t believe the story of what many consider the art world’s biggest mystery has hit the small screen yet (although The Simpsons have given it a nod), but perhaps it’s only a matter of time until that happens.

On St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, security guards at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston made an error in judgement that set in motion the mystery.

Rick Abath and Randy Hestand, two young security guards without much experience, broke protocol when they let what they thought was two policemen into the building.

Bloomberg to take it from there:

Abath was still relaxing behind the desk at 1:24 a.m. when two Boston police officers approached a side entrance and asked to be let in. “I could see that they had hats, coats, badges,” he said in a 2013 interview with a Boston Globe reporter. “So I buzzed them in.”

The officers explained that they’d received reports of a disturbance and needed to ask the guards some questions. “Randy, will you please come to the desk?” Abath radioed to Hestand, who quickly returned. That’s when things got weird.

The cops told Abath he was under arrest, and also handcuffed Hestand, before informing them that this was actually a robbery.

The guards were locked in the museum’s basement, and the thieves set about their real work:

They took three of the four Rembrandts that hung on the wall, including his only seascape; a landscape by Govaert Flinck; and one of the only 36 Vermeer paintings known to still exist. If they’d felt pressed for time they would have just removed the frames from the wall and run off. Instead they took the paintings down, separated them from their frames, and even cut two of the Rembrandt canvases from their stretchers…

Only at 2:45AM, more than an hour after they first entered the building, did they leave, and neither the thieves nor the artwork they stole has ever been seen again.

If you look at the image up top, you’ll see an empty frame in the centre. Isabella Gardner’s will stipulates that the artworks can’t be rearranged, sold, or donated, so the museum has left the empty frames where the stolen paintings used to hang.

When the tally was added up, 13 artworks estimated to be worth as much as $500 million were taken, and those who have spent the past three decades trying to catch the men responsible are left with unanswered questions.

In 2017, in the hopes of receiving information that may help them, the museum offered a $10 million reward to anybody who could tell them where the artworks could be found.

That reward is still on offer, but has yet to shed any new light on the heist. Anthony Amore, the chief investigator at the Gardner Museum who has been tasked with solving the crime since 2005, is still stumped:

The Gardner heist lasted for almost an hour and a half; how did the thieves know they had so much time? If they targeted the Rembrandts and the Vermeer because they were worth a lot of money, why did they leave the museum’s most valuable painting, Titian’s Rape of Europa, which art historians have called one of the most important examples of Renaissance art?

“It’s really emblematic of the whole investigation,” he says. “The deeper and deeper you dig, the more questions are raised.”

Amore isn’t acting alone, because the crime has been the subject of intense investigation by countless FBI agents, private detectives, art dealers, and armchair sleuths.

Still, the thieves remain free, and these artworks are somewhere out there, tucked away.

The full Bloomberg article goes into great detail regarding the investigation and various leads, so if you’re keen to waste a little time on a Friday pretending to be busy, get stuck in.

Should the museum’s phone ring, and the artwork be located, steps are in place to take it from there.

Boston Magazine with some of those:

Once the museum gets the anonymous call or tip it’s been waiting for, there may not be time to wait for a Brinks armored truck to show up at the artworks’ location and shuttle them back home. “It’s just as likely I’d have to put them in the back of my Jeep Grand Cherokee and drive them myself,” Amore says.

If time allows, however, specialists will be brought on-site to package the art—which may be damaged—for transport to the Gardner’s conservation lab. “If any flecks of paint are precarious and might flake off,” Amore says, “we’ve got to make sure none of it is lost.”

Upon the works’ arrival at the Gardner, Gianfranco Pocobene, the museum’s chief conservator, will unpack and inspect them, consulting decades-old notes. “Each one has a very specific cracking pattern, like a fingerprint,” he explains. “We need to be 100 percent certain we’re looking at the real thing.”

From there on out, any damage will be restored (hopefully in a more professional manner than this), before an announcement is made to the world.

That $10 million would then be dished out, and the museum once more opened to the public to show off the long-lost artworks.

I like that the museum is optimistic, but after 30 years, they may never get so lucky.

[sources:bloomberg&bostonmag]